Last week my Congressman, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Cuba) was one of two dozen Democrats to take “the SNAP Challenge” and live off of a $31.50 food allowance for a week in response to proposed cuts in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Funding for SNAP has soared from $18 billion in 2000 to $74 billion in 2011. It’s now used by 45 million Americans. Yet Congressman McGovern believes that the program should not be cut.

If, as he claims, 50 million Americans are going hungry in spite of this growth in the SNAP program, SNAP is not working.

Small businesses today are fighting to survive. If the U.S. Senate has its way, many won’t.

By an astounding vote of 69-27, the U.S. Senate today passed another tax hike – one that will require even the smallest online businesses to track and charge sales and use taxes based on the country’s 9,600 different taxing authorities.

No one knows how many laws there are in the United States. Apparently, no one can count that high.

They’ve been accumulating, of course, for more than 200 years. When federal laws were first codified in 1927, they fit into a single volume. By the 1980s, there were 50 volumes of more than 23,000 pages.

When Hollywood producers make movies, they disrupt local businesses, demand (and get) discount pricing, then leave, creating no permanent jobs.

So why is this considered “economic development,” worthy of tax credits so large that Hollywood producers not only end up paying no taxes, they are able to sell off the credits and make a profit – at the expense of those of us who actually pay taxes?